I awoke late Tuesday morning with that stupid jingle still stuck in my head. Well into my first cup of coffee, those dancing robed men played on repeat. Gabriel left a note on the table letting me know he went on to school, don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I stared at the piece of paper and brought it closer, tracing the letters with my fingertip. The same familiar slant, the thin loops and the barely dotted “i’s” – it was very much like my own scratchy handwriting. Folding up the small piece of paper, I stuffed it in the pocket of my white bathrobe until it reached its final destination. It’s where I stored all his notes and artwork, in a handful of shoeboxes tucked away in my bedroom closet. Fat cat hurled himself onto the kitchen table and purred his way over to my hand, bumping his head against my fingers until I released my coffee mug and gave him my full attention. He drooled as I scratched his ears and asked if he wanted breakfast, a pointless question but one that I posed every morning. His answer was always the same. I lifted up my mug as he jumped from the table and landed quite gracefully next to his food dish. Huffing through his tiny pink nose, he waited while the slow human fumbled with the food can. He purred while scarfing down his chicken and then waddled out to the middle of the living room where he spread himself across the rug. A knock at the door sent him darting up the stairs.

I looked through the peephole and rested my head against the door. “Not now,” I said. “I’m still in my robe.”

Her self-righteous voice permeated through the walls, “We can do this for the neighbors to hear, or you can let me inside!”

I sighed and unlocked the door. “Come on in, Lisa,” I said, and headed back to the kitchen.

She slammed the door and sought me out, her high-heeled shoes clicking against the hardwood floor as she arrived in the kitchen with folded arms. Her blonde, almost white hair framed her long face with delicate curls, and her crystal blue eyes bore down upon me with mascara-laced hatred. I cringed at the sight of her pale pink sweater and long pencil skirt, the one with a deep slit down the back and delicate buttons lining the seams. The one that Michael claimed was his favorite. I refilled my coffee and leaned against the counter.

“What can I do for you?”

She chunked her bag-like purse onto the kitchen table and positioned her mouth to speak, her eyes squinting and her hand coming up from under her arm as if preparing to cast out demons. Instead, she held it to her forehead and stood silent in the face of our long-awaited confrontation, for a few seconds anyway.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” she asked.

She knew who I was. Rhetorical question I assumed, but I paused before answering, still digesting the fact that she was standing in my kitchen. I asked her if Michael knew where she was. She pursed her lips and re-crossed her arms.

“I don’t know, why don’t we ask him?” She turned and yelled toward my bedroom, “Hey, Babe, do you know where I am?”

I adjusted my robe and answered for him, “He’s not here, Lis.”

She wanted to call me out. Turning toward the bedroom again and then back at me, she narrowed her eyes and asked, “What’d he do, crawl out the window?”

“Doubt it,” I said, “he’s afraid of heights.” But this was no laughing matter, and I truly regretted making light of the situation. Michael never returned home last night, and according to Lisa, he snuck out of bed and left in the middle of the night. I told her I had no idea where he could have gone. I explained that I hadn’t seen him since walking him home at around seven in the evening last night.

“Wow. Aren’t we quite the little gentleman,” she said. “You give him a kiss goodnight too?”

“He was scared, Lis,” I answered.

She pushed air through her tight lips and laughed, “He should be.”

I didn’t see the point in trying to explain. Lisa drew her own conclusions and was as hard-headed as a mountain goat when it came to seeing a different point of view. It was either her way or the highway, and perhaps Michael finally chose the latter of the two. She brushed away cat hair from her purse before strapping it to her shoulder. The sarcasm faded from her face, and the pain overwhelmed her eyes as she rubbed the sides of her arms and hugged herself tightly, her already full breasts appearing even fuller in her tight pink sweater.

“I hope it’s worth it,” she said, “destroying my marriage and all. I hope you’re in love with him.”

The kitchen tile held my attention until Lisa finally looked away and swore under her breath. I followed her to the door and held my breath when she turned to face me at the last minute. Almost there, I thought, your hand’s on the knob, now turn!

“The next time you and my husband have a sleepover,” she said, flipping back her white curls, “give the S&M a rest. His wrists look infected.” She slammed the door on my face before I could respond.

Throwing it back open, I stepped out into the hallway and yelled, “It’s not me!” Lisa stopped, readjusted her purse, and kept walking.

Her perfume still lingered in the air as I sat down at the kitchen table and buried my face in my hands. I wanted to run after her and knock her off that high horse, tell her how I really felt, tell her that she’s the one to blame for her failed marriage, tell her that I knew about her transgressions, but I didn’t. Lisa could have the win. Besides, she wasn’t worth the time or the effort, and more importantly, I had to track down Michael. I called his cell phone but wasn’t too concerned when I didn’t get a reply. This was before the fall of the Twin Towers and a few years after Cobain took a shotgun to the head, so cell phones weren’t all that common yet, but a few of us still had them back in those days. I set the cordless phone down and stared at my coffee mug, a colorful souvenir I bought while drunk on Bourbon Street a few years back, as if I needed another coffee mug. Fat cat meowed, waddled into the kitchen, jumped up on the table and rubbed against my hand – an apology for fleeing when the intruder arrived. I told him I’d think about it. Panic set in the more I thought about Michael’s whereabouts, and although the possibilities were endless, I decided to check my gallery first. I threw on some clothes and ran for the door, but the ringing phone stopped me. Please be him! Billy… I’d call him later.

The sports car would have gotten me there sooner, but I needed the time to think. I walked briskly against the wind and braced myself for whatever, or whoever, I might find. I knew he’d be there, just like the last time this happened, the last time he went missing. Michael was a chameleon. No matter the circumstance, nor the crowd, nor the time of day, Michael wore the perfect mask, blending with his environment and camouflaging any scars or weak spots. He played the game so well that even I couldn’t see the obvious, or perhaps I didn’t want to. After the last time this happened, I did nothing and told no one. I dropped the subject and swept it under the rug like some dirty little secret, but Lisa had to know something. Surely the blonde bimbo knew that I would never tie up Michael’s wrists until they bled, but she didn’t want to see it, and I understood that. I didn’t want to see it either.

I turned the corner onto my street and stopped to light a cigarette. A few cars sat parked on the curb, but none belonged to Michael. I doubted he would have taken his car anyway. Someone either picked him up, or he was on foot. The wind cut through my jacket as a cold front arrived from the north reminding me that it was late October, reminding me that summer wasn’t forever, even down south. I buttoned my lapel and stuffed my chin into the jacket, slowing my pace and finishing my smoke before arriving at the small black building. After reaching the first set of long, lightly tinted windows, I knew. The way the door sat in the frame or the thin crack on the side, up top and underneath, the way the metal handle reacted to the wind, I knew it would be unlocked.

Nothing looked out of place as I switched on the light and quickly glanced around. No spilled paint cans or broken canvases, and my newest sculptures remained unharmed (as awful as they were), but nothing had been destroyed like the last time. I opened the door to my small office room, stared at the daybed and flipped on the light. Nothing. What now? I sank into the bed and picked up the phone to call Billy back, hoping he might know something, or better yet, might be with Michael. I dialed in his number, hung up and struggled to recall his new number. The light shut off in the main room. I quietly set the phone down, crept to the door, stuck my head out and scanned the familiar shadows. Little by little, things came into view. The paint-covered plastic tarp covering the floor crinkled as I walked, and after reaching the center of the room, I called out to him. Silence. I scanned the shadows again looking for new breaks in the light or a specific form in the shadows, misplaced and low to the ground, hidden. The tarp crackled under my feet as I inched closer to my drawing table. Crouching down on one knee, I tilted my head and bent over on my side. I wanted him to see me first at his level. He flinched back into the corner but I heard him say my name. I heard his childlike voice softly call out, “Ash.”

The drawing table hid most of his face, but as I walked around to the other side my shoe landed on something long and fat on the floor. I stumbled forward and landed on another one, and then another. My eyes focused on the objects as I crept closer to Michael, his knees pulled up to his chin and a pair of long scissors in his hand. I knelt down beside him and gently said his name, the whites of his eyes large and glassy.

“Michael,” I said again, “it’s okay. It’s just you and me, remember? Nothing can harm us when it’s just the two of us.” He tightened his grip on the scissors and shook his head, his eyes darting to the far side of the room and then back to me. Soft and barely audible, he spoke in French, repeating the phrase over and over again while rocking back and forth on his heels. I leaned in closer and picked the language apart, dissecting each accented vowel, each rhythmic pause until I became certain I understood the message.

“Who’s coming for us?” I asked. He jabbed the scissors at me with the pointy end coming within inches of my cheek.

“Take them,” he whispered.

I nodded, slowly held out my hand, and gently grabbed hold of his arm. The scissors fell to the floor and I moved in closer, lightly grazing his wrist and rubbing the fresh blood between my fingertips. He trembled in the corner and stared through wide eyes as I released his arm. Carefully removing my jacket, I wrapped it around his shoulders. He pulled it tight around his body and fidgeted with a button on the lapel, turning it clockwise and then counterclockwise while I tied one of his shoelaces that had come undone. Chunks of his long dreadlocks lay scattered about on the floor like strands of black rope that had been ripped away and came unraveled. I reached up and gently cupped his face.

“Michael,” I said, “tell me who’s been hurting you.” His eyes darted to the far left of the room as tears streamed down his face and collided with my hand. He shook his head and continued playing with the button. I ran my hand through his short, knotted hair and pulled him into my chest, his arms clasping my waist and his body still trembling. I wanted to take him over. I wanted to steal him from the floor and keep him hidden in my room. No more tours, no more drugs, no more late-night rendezvous with God knows who, just mine. Mine to preserve and nurture, protect and defend, love and honor – I wanted to hide him away from the world.

His body relaxed into my arms as I stroked his back and told him everything would be okay. “It’s just the two of us, we’re okay,” but as I said this, a shadow appeared on the wall. I hadn’t noticed it before. In the far corner of the room next to my potter’s wheel, a long shadow with a human-like figure darkened the wall. I tried to place the object responsible for casting the image, but the longer I stared at the shadow, the more defined it became. Michael’s grip tightened and his breath became heavy in my ear.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s only a shadow, see, look…” I reached up for the light switch just above our heads, but Michael grabbed my arm and pulled it back down.

“Please, don’t!” he whispered. “I don’t want to see him!” His eyes, wide and scattered, bounced from me to the wall. He cowered back into the corner and began rubbing his wrists, one and then the other, right and then left, back and forth, he rubbed until blood covered his hands. I turned to look at the shadow again, but the potter’s wheel was the only form projected onto the wall. I reached up and flipped on the light.

“See,” I said, turning to Michael, “nothing there.” He jerked away from the wall and looked around the room, at me, at the floor, at his wrists and hands, at me again. He blinked and looked away, but I recognized him. I saw the familiar look in his eyes and knew the episode had run its course. He avoided eye contact and picked up one his dreadlocks from the floor, flipping it around in his hand and patting down the top of his head. Tossing it to the side, he buried his face in his arms.

“Come on,” I said, holding out my hand, “let’s take care of those wrists.”

I rummaged through my desk drawers trying to locate my first aid kit while Michael sat on the daybed, his head down and his arms folded over his shoulders. A light rain misted the long windows of the gallery, and the wind howled through the old oak tree to the side of the building. Acorns pounded the roof as Michael buried his head into my jacket and curled up on the small bed, his back against the wall and his knees tucked under his chin. I pulled up a chair and gently touched his shoulder. He stuck out his arm, and I rolled up the cuffs of my black pea coat exposing his bloody wrist. The skin had been rubbed raw, but as I cleaned the infected area, I noticed the indentation resembled the markings of barbed wire. I grew sick to my stomach.

“This ends now,” I said, and began bandaging his other wrist.

While Michael slept, I stepped out of the office, gathered up his thick dreadlocks, and set them down on my drawing table. Thumbing through them, I put them in order from longest to shortest. A slight bit of guilt came over me as I thought of ways to incorporate them into my work, maybe some sort of mixed media piece using the window-frame I bought. I could paint each one a different color and somehow portray his brilliance, his beautiful anguish with the window being a gateway into his mind, and the dreadlocks signifying his multiple personalities. We’d never talked about it, and my conclusion about his mental state was mine alone, but I‘d seen this before. Not so much when we were kids, but for the past four or five years, I noticed the change in him, the subtleties in his demeanor, the way he held himself, and the way he acted around certain people – I noticed something was off.

Six months ago, I arrived at my studio to find the windows broken and the inside completely trashed. Splashes of paint covered the walls, sculptures were smashed, my miniature statues were decapitated with the heads lying about on the floor, tables were turned over, and chunks of broken pottery littered the ground. When I opened the door to my office, I found Michael asleep on the daybed. He denied having a hand in the vandalism and said it must have happened while he was sleeping, but I knew he was lying. Thing is, I don’t think he knew he was lying, not at first anyway. A few days later, he put up the money to pay for the damages. That had been the worst episode, the worst I knew about anyway, but Michael showed signs that something was wrong well before destroying my gallery, but again, the signs were subtle and barely noticeable, unless you knew him as well as I did. He contradicted himself over simple stuff. He liked okra. He hated okra. He was afraid of heights. He didn’t mind heights. He was a cat person. He was a dog person. He was an early riser. He was a night owl. Simple stuff, insignificant until you stepped away and weighed the contradictions as a whole. Michael was whoever he needed to be at the moment, but I eventually realized it was more than just playing the game; it was a way of coping with the past.

The rain pounded against the windows as I walked over to my potter’s wheel and stared at the wall, running my fingers over the flat surface and observing the surrounding objects. I walked over to the light switch and turned it off. No shadow. I flipped it back on and went outside for a smoke. Somehow, through mind manipulation or through the power of suggestion, Michael must have projected what he thought he saw onto me, some sort of psychological phenomenon that I became susceptible to due to the stressful situation. In other words, to be more exact, my eyes were playing tricks on me. Whether or not this was the case, it pacified my mind. The rain beat down on the awning and the wind tore through my thin clothing, but I was numb to the weather. Numb was a good word to describe me in general, but seeing the rapid decline of my best friend, my everything, triggered an awakening in me, and in a sick way, I enjoyed it.

I returned to my office to find Michael awake and sitting up on the edge of the bed. He stood when I entered the room and began taking the jacket off, fidgeting with the sleeves and giving his full attention to the entire process. I stood in the doorway and waited. He yanked out his other arm and placed my coat on the bed, rubbing the back of his neck and looking everywhere but at my face.

“I gotta go,” he said. “I’ll call you later.”

I stepped forward and closed the door behind me. “No,” I said, “we need to talk. Now.”

Michael laughed and shook his head, “Not now, Ash. I can’t do this now.”

I told him he had no choice. I was prepared to take him down. He wasn’t leaving this time, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought it best that he stayed with me for the next few nights. When I told him this, he stepped closer and gently kissed my neck, moving up next to my ear and then grazing his lips across my cheek, but I pushed him away.

“We have to face this,” I said. “We can’t let this one go.”

His eyes bore into me with his chest only a few inches away from mine. I braced myself. Protect the goal, don’t let this one get away, knock him out if you have to, but he relaxed his shoulders and backed down. Glancing at my desk, he turned and cleared away a spot knocking a stack of papers, the telephone, and my ceramic pencil holder onto the floor. Hopping up, he crossed his legs and lit a cigarette, once again, ignoring my no smoking rule.

“Let’s talk then,” he said, flicking a pencil off the edge of my desk. “You had no business calling my wife like that.”

“What? Hey, you’re the one who tried to kiss me in front of her.”

Michael lifted his chin and blew smoke at the ceiling, “No I didn’t,” he said.

I stood back and studied him. His amber eyes followed the stream of smoke from his cigarette, and his black combat boot lightly tapped the side of my desk. He flicked ashes onto the floor and scratched the back of his head. His fingers dug into his scalp until the scratch turned in to a one-handed upper-neck massage. In his other hand, the cigarette burned to the filter as he brought it to his lips and then quickly pinched it away, dropping it into my cold cup of coffee.

I sat down on the daybed and leaned back on my elbow. “Where were you last night?” I asked. “Do you even know?”

“Of course, I…”

“Where?”

He looked down at his wrists and shook his head, “Home. I was at home.”

I nodded and asked how long he’d been at my studio. He shrugged and looked away. I asked about his wrists. He made a joke about Lisa. I asked about the devil fucking his brains out, he laughed and called me crazy. I asked him who was coming for us, he jumped off the desk and pointed his finger in my face.

“You saw it too!” he hissed. “I know you did. You saw what I saw.” He wrapped his arms around his slender frame and fell back against the desk, “But you’ll never admit it.”

I sighed and shook my head, “I saw a shadow, Michael, that’s all, a shadow on the wall.”

He clinched his jaw and stared at the ground knocking the heel of his boot against the front of the other. “I killed that guy,” he said.

“What guy?”

Michael slid off the desk and softly landed on the floor with his knees bent. I knew exactly who he meant, but the comment took me off guard. Why now? All these years later, why confess the sin now, in the grips of a mental breakdown, but I knew it was all connected.  I suppressed the past and pushed it down until the memories became someone else’s, but Michael confronted the past by becoming someone else. I slid down next to him on the floor and listened while he relived the moment, looking off into a trance and describing his unabated rage.

“I wanted to kill him,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘just stop, man, it’s over, just run away,’ but I couldn’t. The pole came down on his head, over and over again, that same spot on the side of his head,” Michael stopped and held my stare. “I felt him die, Ash, his energy, it consumed me. I breathed it in. It was exhilarating, like the perfect drug. I wanted to do it again.” He reached up to the desk, grabbed his smokes and lit another one. I joined him this time, once again, breaking my own rule.

“If you hadn’t done what you did,” I said, “I’d be dead.”

Michael nodded, “I know, but what if, I don’t know, what if I’m possessed or something? What if that’s what’s wrong with me?”

I refrained from rolling my eyes or replying with some sort of sarcastic remark, but omitting sarcasm rendered me speechless, as is often the case when I’m trying to be good. My silence dragged on for much too long though. Sweat beads overtook my forehead as I struggled to find the right words, the perfect reply to ease his mind yet discredit his fear of the supernatural. The words never came.

“You think I’m crazy,” he said.

“Maybe a little,” I replied, and then ran my hand through his new haircut. “But we’re all a little crazy sometimes.”

We opened the small office window to let some of the smoke out, and the wind scattered whatever papers remained on my desk onto the floor. Michael shivered and dove for my jacket before I had a chance to offer it to him. He asked if he could keep it, I said “sure.” One of the biggest rock stars in the business, but sure, keep the jacket. I crawled under the thin layer of covers on my daybed and moved over to let Michael in. The round was over. I knew I wouldn’t get anything else out of him, but that’s how things worked between us. Michael played the devil card and I played the adversary, one in the same really, but things were a little different this time. The devil was turning out to be real. The devil was encroaching on my territory, stringing my best friend up by his wrists and having his way with him.

The wind howled through the streets and tore through the window as Michael curled up next to me and closed his eyes. It was a perfect day for the weather – muggy and warm, now windy and cold – changing in an instant and taking me off guard. Sometimes, those days are the best. I ran my finger across Michael’s forehead and watched him sleep safely beside me, out of reach from the devil and secure in my care. My best friend whose marriage I helped destroy, but it was worth it. As I traced his eyebrows with the tip of my finger and listened to the rhythm of his breathing, I knew it was worth it. Close relationships are not something I have. Some people call me shy, others call me stuck up, and while it’s true I’m a little of both, my loner mentality is mostly due to my distrust and disdain for humanity in general. I don’t cry at the movies, I’m not a team player, and I wipe my hand after shaking someone else’s. I worship nothing, I have no heroes, and I most certainly don’t fall in love. I wasn’t in love with Michael. I just loved him.